A rainy country this, that I am monarch of, —
A rich but powerless king, worn-out while yet a boy;
For whom in vain the falcon falls upon the dove,
Not even his starving people's groans can give him joy;
Scorning his tutors, loathing his spaniels, finding stale
His favourite jester's quips, yawning at the droll tale.
His bed, for all its fleurs de lis, looks like a tomb;
The ladies of the court, attending him, to whom
He, being a prince, is handsome, see him lying there
Cold as a corpse, and lift their shoulders in despair:
No garment they take off, no garter they leave on
Excites the gloomy eye of this young skeleton.
The royal alchemist, who makes him gold from lead,
The baser element from out the royal head
Cannot extract; nor can those Roman baths of blood,
For some so efficacious, cure the hebetude
Of him, along whose veins, where flows no blood at all,
For ever the slow waters of green Lethe crawl.

Bibliography

Baudelaire, Charles. Flowers of Evil. Trans. George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1936. Millay entitled this second of the "Spleen" poems "The Sphinx." I have compared the French text in this bilinguial edition to that in Antoine Adam's 1959 Garnier edition [GPL].